Children’s Existential Encounters in Literature

Abstract

The second chapter comprises a review of literature on the topic of the existential in children. It starts with an inquiry into its definition before it looks at education and psychotherapy as those relational practices that share an interest in children’s subjective histories and the meanings they make of these. A lack of attention to preschool children’s existential encounters is identified alongside the need of adults’ (practitioners and researchers alike) readiness to engage with their own existential encounters so as to make space for those of children. The chapter concludes with a review of the dialogue between existentialism and psychoanalysis, drawing links between the creative and the interpersonal unconscious. The space for an existential/phenomenological-psychoanalytic integrative approach is identified for the purpose of understanding children’s lives from a psychosocial perspective.